In a known implementation of a remote printing application, a user enters into a receiving device the names of one or more users who wish to receive documents. The limitations of this prior art approach include the following.
Firstly, the receiving device needs to store the names of all users who wish to receive documents.
Secondly, the receiving device needs to have an ability to validate users. Conventional receiving devices can be defeated by someone impersonating another user by entering the name of that other user into the receiving device. User authentication information is very sensitive, and distributing it across a plurality of different devices is risky.
Thirdly, when a user wishes to direct documents to a different receiving device, she must remove her name from the old receiving device and add her name to the new receiving device. Having two devices receiving prints for the same user makes system behavior unpredictable.
In another prior art implementation, a name is assigned to a receiving device. For example a phone number may be assigned to a receiving device as the name. A user specifies in a server computer an identifier of the receiving device, which will handle the documents. This implementation has some implications as follows:
Firstly, a separate administrator must provide a unique identifier to the receiving device.
Secondly, a user must find out the identifier of the receiving device and provide it to the server.
Specific implementations according to the present invention aim to provide a remote printing service, method and apparatus, which avoids some of the problems as described above with prior art printing applications.